Government Internet Shutdowns Cost $19.7B in 2025 1/9/26, 2:49 PM creating widespread disruption while preserving the appearance of partial connectivity. Because Cloud!are underpins a substantial share of Western web infrastructure and online services, targeting it in this way marked another concrete step toward Russia’s vision of a sovereign “RuNet”. Rather than severing connections outright, this approach functionally isolated Russian users from the global internet while reducing the visibility and political cost of overt bans. Taken together, these measures reflect a broader shift toward infrastructure-level censorship: persistent, technically precise restrictions designed to suppress access to information, undermine economic activity, and complicate circumvention. At the same time, Russia’s 2025 shutdowns presented specific methodological challenges for economic measurement. The 16 KB Curtain in particular blurred the line between an “active” and “offline” connection. Although access was technically available, the severe throughput restriction rendered most platforms and services effectively non-functional. For this reason, we treated the intervention as a functional platform outage rather than a typical internet blackout. Our estimated economic cost of $3.73 billion is therefore a highlevel approximation of the practical impact of the restriction. Russia’s scale also created challenges in quantifying the volume of hyper-localized internet disruptions. One Russian monitoring group compiling user reports on Telegram estimated more than 600 individual incidents during the summer alone. Rather than treating each incident separately, we aggregated concurrent, similar outages. While this reduces the total number, it provides a more reliable basis for estimating economic impact and better reflects the scale of disruption across the country. https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/ Page 9 of 33